After 40 years at Boeing, chief test pilot John Cashman is retiring

By JAMES WALLACE, P-I AEROSPACE REPORTER

Updated
10:00 pm PST, Thursday, January 11, 2007

John Cashman, Boeing's chief test pilot and director of flight operations, is retiring at the end of the month. Appropriately enough, his retirement party tonight will be at the Museum of Flight. Cashman is shown here in the cockpit of a 737-900 earlier this week. less

John Cashman, Boeing's chief test pilot and director of flight operations, is retiring at the end of the month. Appropriately enough, his retirement party tonight will be at the Museum of Flight. Cashman is ... more

Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

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John Cashman, Boeing's chief test pilot and director of flight operations, is retiring at the end of the month. Appropriately enough, his retirement party tonight will be at the Museum of Flight. Cashman is shown here in the cockpit of a 737-900 earlier this week. less

John Cashman, Boeing's chief test pilot and director of flight operations, is retiring at the end of the month. Appropriately enough, his retirement party tonight will be at the Museum of Flight. Cashman is ... more

Photo: Andy Rogers/Seattle Post-Intelligencer

After 40 years at Boeing, chief test pilot John Cashman is retiring

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Nothing much was riding on that first flight but perhaps the future of The Boeing Co.'s commercial airplanes business.

The company had invested billions of dollars in an all-new jetliner, the 777, and Boeing test pilots John Cashman and Ken Higgins were about to find out if the big twin-engine plane could actually fly. It was June 12, 1994.

Just before he climbed the stairway to enter the plane for its maiden flight from Everett's Paine Field, command pilot Cashman spoke with Boeing's president, Phil Condit. An engineer, Condit had headed the 777 development program for a while.

"Good luck, John," Condit told him as he shook his hand. "And no rolls!"

Nearly four decades earlier, in August 1955, Boeing test pilot Tex Johnston did a barrel roll in the company's new four-engine Dash-80, the predecessor of the 707, over Lake Washington during the annual hydroplane races. Among the spectators was a horrified Bill Allen, Boeing's boss at the time. Johnston's stunt was one for the history books, but it nearly got him fired.

Condit did not have to worry about history repeating itself. Cashman had rolled the 777 during training in a simulator, but he was not about to do so this important day. He and Higgins flew the 777 for three hours and 48 minutes -- Boeing's longest ever first flight for one of its new jetliners. No rolls.

Recently, Condit, who resigned as Boeing's chief executive and chairman in late 2003, spoke to Cashman to again wish him good luck -- in retirement.

Cashman turns 63 on Jan. 31, and that's the age when Boeing requires test pilots to stop flying. So after 40 years at Boeing, Cashman is retiring at the end of the month. He has been Boeing's chief test pilot and director of flight operations since October 1997.

Among Cashman's well-wishers was Alan Mulally, who last September resigned as Boeing's commercial airplane's boss to become chief executive of Ford Motor Co.

Friends are throwing a retirement party for Cashman tonight at the Museum of Flight at Boeing Field. No doubt there will be a lot of storytelling.

Cashman has been an airplane guy since he was a boy.

"I've touched and breathed and smelled airplanes since I was 5 years old," Cashman said in an interview this week.

He grew up near a naval air station in Illinois. Cashman's father flew planes in the 1930s before becoming a college physics professor.

Cashman recalled how he would sit in a cardboard box in the family's basement and pretend he was flying. He was in the seventh grade when he took his first airplane ride, from Chicago to Atlanta, in an Eastern Airlines Constellation.

Later, Cashman wanted to become a military pilot, but his eyesight was not perfect so he went to the University of Michigan to study aerospace engineering. There, he joined the school's flying club, eventually becoming president. He received his private pilot's license in 1965.

When he graduated in 1966, the aerospace business was booming and Cashman had job offers from seven companies, including Boeing.

"I wanted to work on airplanes," Cashman said. He took the Boeing job in Seattle in July that year. A few months later, in December, he married his college sweetheart. At Boeing, Cashman initially worked as a structural engineer but continued his flying with the Boeing Flying Club.

Cashman's big break came in 1974, when he was hired as a flight engineer for Boeing's 747SP (special performance) program.

"I never thought when I came to Boeing I would be a pilot," Cashman said. Typically, Boeing pilots had come out of the military.

In the years that followed, Cashman participated in a number of Boeing flight-test programs and in 1989 was named chief pilot for the 767 and 767X programs. The 767X became the 777, which was officially launched in October 1990.

Condit initially headed the program. When Condit was named Boeing's president, Mulally took over.

As chief 777 pilot, Cashman was an integral part of the weekly and sometimes daily program review meetings that became known, Cashman said, as "Alan's Marathons." There was a free flow of information, from intense discussion to sometimes heated debate.

Finally, it was time for that historic first flight.

Every contingency had been discussed and planned for. The 777 would be Boeing's first fly-by-wire jetliner (one that uses electronic inputs rather than hydraulics) and if something happened to the controls on the first flight, Cashman and Higgins would divert to Edwards AFB in the high desert of California rather than try to land at Paine Field.

Cashman and Higgins carried parachutes. They were not needed. But the unexpected would happen on subsequent test flights.

The most serious came early on when the pilots were testing the plane's stall characteristics at different wing flap settings. A plane stalls when the wings lose lift. Cashman and Higgins were testing the 777 with full flaps, which would be the configuration for landing. Instead of simply nosing over when the wings lost lift, the big jet became inverted as it dove toward the earth.

Cashman uttered an expletive and called for 20 degrees of flaps. The jet had been stable before in that configuration during stall tests. But the 777 quickly picked up too much speed for the 20-degree flap setting. Cashman called for five degrees of flaps and regained control.

Later, Cashman and Higgins duplicated the same stall for engineers. He figures they made about 600 such stalls until engineers were sure the problem had been fixed.

It's one of the things that Cashman will miss -- finding solutions to problems.

Cashman has about 10,000 hours of flying as a Boeing test pilot, though his time in the air has dropped off considerably the past few years because of the demands of the flight operations job. But he plans to get in a few more hours of flying next week, on pre-delivery flights, before he retires. He wants at least one more time at the controls of a 777.

Although he is leaving Boeing before the first flight of the 787 Dreamliner, Cashman expects to be at Everett's Paine Field in late August or early September when the 787 makes its maiden flight.

The 787 is one plane that Cashman wishes he could fly, with all its new technology.

Despite years of training and planning and preparation for that first 787 flight, the pilots will no doubt encounter the unexpected, Cashman said.

"That's what we do," he said. "We find things so our customers don't have to."